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Millennials: Living the Dream

I just received a lengthy, beautifully handwritten letter from my uni bff and it inspired me to finally sit down and write a post about the dire state of a millennial's life. Don't worry, this is not going to be some long, self-pitying diatribe or anything. A lot of what she wrote just summed up my current mental state and I'm sure that of many others. Of course there are those who have it all figured out but I keep wondering why it's the case that so many of us are leading, as I quote my friend, "the life of a university graduate's dream" of being as confused as a Amish person in a strip club.

Like any recent in today's world, having studied liberal arts or otherwise, I think a lot of us are plagued with the idea of self-actualisation. Whether your goal is to make a lot of money (as flexible as that concept is) or finding an avenue to express for your creativity and pretentiously abstract mind or change the world with your grand political visions - it all seems to go to shit the second you step into the real world. And coming to terms with that is so difficult. So the rational ones among us suck it up and adjust their mindset while others do stupid shit - like go to grad school (like me) just to delay the inevitable.

All I do is write about environmental justice and the morality of gay marriage, pretending that I know something about the real world. But at what point is it necessary to just stop and tell yourself: make a fucking decision and do what you have to do to survive. I can't help but feel that we're all just going through the formalities of education, volunteer experiences in a third world country, or a year out waitressing to 'find' ourselves; all this time, we could have just made a simple decision of getting a job, stop taking money from parents, and break up with that hipster boyfriend who studied the Metaphysics of Feminism and is working as a barrister (so hot).

Maybe confusion or this quarter life crisis is not something that you need to sort out. What needs to be sorted out is, perhaps, the fastest, most pragmatic route to be in the real world. Passion and fulfilment might just have to be pushed aside when they're just ideas floating around but never seems to settle. I'm not sure if I can say that millennials are more narcissistic that previous generations because there are just so many exceptions. Not every Gen Y looks like they walked out of an episode of Girls but I do think that overall, more of us are stunted when it comes to having a realistic understanding of self-actualisation.

I'm not sure if this post made any sense or if I'm just overthinking everything. Maybe my millennial-brain has compromised by ability to reason like a normal person, who knows.